Andrey Badalov, KGB-linked Transneft vice-president, dies in fall from Moscow penthouse
An oil tycoon with links to the KGB has become the latest high-profile figure to mysteriously fall from a high building in Russia.
Transneft vice-president Andrey Badalov, 62, is reported to have fallen from the penthouse of the luxury high-rise where he lived in Moscow.
‘Badalov’s body was found under the windows of an [apartment building] on Rublevskoye Highway,’ a source told TASS.
They said investigators were working at the scene.
Transneft is Russia’s state oil pipeline monopoly run by former KGB spy, Nikolai Tokarev, 74, who served with Vladimir Putin, 72, in Germany during the Cold War.
Badalov had studied at the General Staff Academy of the Armed Forces, which trains high-level officers and state managers.
Several executives linked to the oil and gas industries have died mysteriously since Putin launched his attack on Ukraine in 2022.
The incidents are usually described by Russian authorities as suicides, but doubts have been raised over several cases.
In a sarcastic post online, Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazansky wrote: ‘Top managers of YUKOS and Lukoil have already fallen out of windows before.
‘What are you laughing at? They just fall out of windows themselves.
‘Russian oil workers have this professional deformity. As soon as they approach the windows, their legs immediately give way.’
In 2022, Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, died when he fell from a sixth-floor window at Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow, also known as the Kremlin Clinic.
On the same morning, Putin – who had earlier decorated Maganov, 67, with a top honor – visited the hospital to pay his final respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who had died the same week.
In 2023, leading war official Marina Yankina, 58, head of the financial support department of the Russian Defence Ministry’s Western Military District, was found dead after falling 160ft from a 16th-floor window in St. Petersburg.
The circumstances surrounding her death remain unclear.
Former oil company vice president Mikhail Rogachev, 64, died after falling from his tenth-floor apartment in Moscow in October 2024.
He had been a senior executive at Yukos, an oil company dismembered by Putin and his associates.
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